Nonsequittal Rumblings

I’m running into a dillemma. I’m starting to handle more and more larger size project, which is still handled mostly by me. And I’m far from having the best programming or project management practice. Recently, I’ve been googling in search of a good tool to put me under good discipline, with no success. What now? Just keep my crappy practice? And let the people who take over these programs suffer? Bleh!

I’ve installed OpenWiki as a means of project documentation, but so far, I’ve had very little motivation to fill it up… Comments in the program source code are very sparse at best. I need something… really, something…

I caught the moment, and I couldn’t let it go.

Just couple months ago, I bought a new hard drive, along with a hard drive case, so I could make my own external hard drive unit. It works really well for me, with the combination of USB2 and firewire.

Yesterday evening, as I was driving back from dropping my daughter off with her mother, I noticed my windshield was filthy. It was covered with the dead insects. That hinted me with one fact – it’s going to rain soon. Some people knows that when the insects/bugs are flying low, it is going to rain soon.

And yes, it really did, and brought some thunder and stuff a long with it. That also meant that there is a great chance for power blackout or brownouts. And, no, I didn’t think about that when I was driving back last night.

Right before I went to bed, I started encoding Runaway Jury, using this external drive. There must have been a brownout over night.

The PC kept running, because it’s plugged in to the back up power supply. I like my UPS for this reason. But my external drive sort of failed, because it was not receiving the grace of the UPS. Well…. duh. Why didn’t I think of that before? Now I need to go back and figure out which power cord goes with which device, so I can plug this good, trusty drive into the power backup system. Oh, pain in the behind…

As I read different people’s blogs, I notice…

I’m such a geek.

People write about their daily lives, their feelings, etc…

I write about new open source software I find, programming stuff (I will in the future, I’m sure), etc, etc, and other geeky stuff.

But, hey, let’s face it. This is the stuff I get excited about. And I don’t see myself changing anytime soon. No, if I change, then that wouldn’t be me any more.

So, let’s have some change of mood. I’ve talked about Jazz band before. It’s the band is organized by my work place. We recently had a party of our own. The band played in the back yard of one of the band member’s house – in which we rehears every Monday evenings. They invited their neighbors to let them see what in the world is going on at their place every Monday.It so coinsided with the weekend when Emily flew in from W.V., and Evan was with me as well. It just turned out to be a perfect timing.

Playing music is always fun. I’ve always enjoyed it since the first day I picked up trumpet… 18 years ago. Emily also told me that she had fun listening to us. It was really good to hear. So far, she had no chance of hearing me play with the jazz band I talk about all the time. It’s not a professional band. It’s just a hobbyist group, just for fun… and people love us for it. She loved it! What a great feeling.

I think I’ve finally come up with the solution I like.

I’ve used nntp//rss for a while. It works well to a point. But it’s not perfect. I can’t perse some RSS files for some very minor errors. http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fweather.gov%2Fdata%2Fcurrent_obs%2FKICT.rss is one example of those. See how minor the error is? A program should be able to ignore that kind of error, and go ahead and perse the document.

I’ve also mentioned about the lack of support for the HTTP authentication protected feeds on nntp//rss. It was going to be supported as of version 0.4. But I’m really not seeing any developement activities. I’ve decided to give up on it.

Also, another gripe is that the way it perse is not always plausible. Reading slashdot feed on it was not very pleasant.

Now I found a new answer. Actually, 2 answers.

1 is a Thunderbird extension called Forumzilla. Usage is very easy. You save the xpi file locally, and install it from Thunderbird. Restart Thunderbird. Go to “Tools” -> “Feed Supscriptions” and set up your stuff! Very nice.

The second solution is Thunderbird 0.8. It’s still in pre-alpha state. But the latest nightly build includes the built-in RSS functionality. Unfortunately, I can’t use this build at work right now, because the proxy support on the windows build seems to be broken, and it crashes every time I try to access the outside documents.

A switch from 0.7 to 0.8 nightly build was rather complex. I had to jump through a few loops to import all the saved messages to the new profile, which now supports all the mail account save the incoming messages in the local folder inbox. Hopefully it will be much easier in the production release of 0.8.

If you’re not too fond of Thunderbird, there also is another choice. As of version 2.0.2, ~Awasu~ has an option to switch the browser engine in its view pane from IE to mozilla. Finally, someone has done it!

But I’m using Thunderbird, and not Awasu for couple reasons. For one, at work, the access to the windows registry is very restricted, and Awasu couldn’t work with that restriction. And for the other, Thunderbird is open source; Awasu is not.

There we go. We now have safe and practical RSS environment.

Additional note : Forumzilla is a bit more cumbersome to use than Thunderbird 0.8 built-in RSS parser. Why? Because forumzilla does not list the link within the normal header or the message body. I have to show “All” the headers, and copy and paste the Content-Base URL. It still works better than anything else I’ve used so far at my work, so I can’t complain too much. (With this, I can be up to date on the latest anime release, get the torrent URL, pull up the Azureus remote-control page, and start the download while I’m still at work. It’s really nifty.)

Normally, I’m not a big fan of sound track albums. They are nice go with the memory of films or series. But usually, they don’t grab my attention enough to make me say mmmmm! And there’s a good reason to it too: the music contained in sound tracks are usually made to be background music. It’s not supposed to draw the viewer’s attention from what’s on the screen, but it’s supposed to help the viewers get into the mood.

HINOTORI is based on Tezuka Osamu’s masterpiece manga. In this story, Hi no Tori (phoenix) possesses special blood, which can give immortality to anyone who consume it. Through the multiple stories weaved into the series, the artists ask one of the most fundamental questions of life and death.

The music production for the series is just as grand. No fake orchestra is used in this recording, for a change! Czech Philharmonic is worldly renowned orchestra, and they’ve done a good job on these tracks. Some tracks are mix of orchestral work with some feeling of easy listening feelings. Those are so-so tracks.

Tracks I’m impressed more are those tracks set purely in classical mood, some of them played along with Niko, traditional Chinese musical instrument. Track 6, Shingun is a grand work, making me think of Mahler (symph no.2 mvmt1), Brahms (symph no.1), and Saint-Saens (symph no.3 mvmt3). Track 7, requiem is a string trio + Niko. It’s very beautiful. Track 8 is based on Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, arranged for orchestra and Niko. It’s another beautiful track. It reminds me of Beethoven’s 9th, 3rd mvmt. Track 9 makes me think somewhat of Stravinsky’s ballet, Firebird.

I love symphonic works in general. And the composers/arrangers have done good work to match my taste! I just wished that more of this album was filled with these types of music.

I hesitated to buy this album. I’ve never bought sound track album in my life before this one. And I’m very glad of this purchase. I’m grateful for NHK for planning and producing this series, and doing a fabulous job at it.

http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/sharing/
This is a place where people can post their purchases if that purchase was influenced by something you’ve downloaded via P2P. There are some studies that shows that P2P file share is actually boosting the music sales, not hurting. This is one person’s attempt to show that it is a possibility. While I don’t know of the effectiveness of this data, I’ve encountered something neat.

I just found the site yesterday via slashdot. Then, just today, shiorichan made a purchase that was motivated by mp3 albums she had downloaded. I was happy I could share this little site with her.